Heavy Soil

I recently commissioned a new HP DL380 G7 server – and stuck a problem when registering the iLO Advanced license – this is needed to continue using the Remote Console beyond the initial install process.

I already had an HP account and I’ve done this before, so no problem I thought. Wrong. After inputting the registration code, I was asked for my SAID (service agreement identifier) – with no indication on the page, the registration certificate or anywhere else as to what that was.

Thankfully our reseller found out the answer – “It’s unknown”, she said. “OK… but the site’s insisting on an entry”, I said. “You actually type ‘UKNOWN’”, she said. And it worked. Crazy but true.

I’m always having the perceived faults of the iPhone 4 pointed out to me, especially Android users. I’m usually happy to fight the corner, but there are some things the iPhone 4 is lacking. One of them is a notification LED. Most of the phones I’ve owned have had them, but not this one.

Except now it does, using the camera flash – it turns out it was added quietly in iOS 5.

Settings, General, Accessibility, LED Flash for Alerts – Job done!

I keep bumping into people who are not aware that crossover Ethernet cables are not needed in this day and age.

If you want to connect two computers together directly by Ethernet and if one or both computers has a gigabit port, a normal (‘straight through’) cable will work just fine.

There is one caveat – the speed and duplex settings must be set to “Auto” on at least one of the computers – the gigabit one in the case of connection with a computer without gigabit.

This is called Auto MDI-X, and it was ratified as a standard back in 1998! It’s years since I’ve needed a crossover cable, and I enjoy the simplicity of not having to worry about whether I have the right cable or not.

I have set up a  Nagios monitoring box at work, running Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit. It’s now connected to a TV so we can have a constantly-refreshing page showing us problems on our systems and networks, and it works very well.

Unfortunately, once I installed an ATI card (Radeon 4350) for an HDMI connection to the TV and installed the proprietary FGLRX graphics driver, remote access to the computer has been a problem – I can connect to the desktop and see it in my client window, but my remote view of it never refreshes from that point on. The Ubuntu box itself keeps working fine, and I could see mouse movements on the TV – but the client window stayed frozen on how it looked when I connected.

This happens in the built-in Remote Desktop, as well as using X11VNC package – both behaved in this broken way. I tried three different clients on my workstation to see of that helped, and it didn’t.

The solution is simple – go to System/Preferences/Appearance, go to the Visual Effect tab, and set it to None. It then works fine, both in X11VNC and the built-in Remote Desktop application.

Other sites have mentioned this as a problem with Nvidia drivers too in the past, as well as the Radeon ones.

Heavy Soil has been offline for a couple of weeks. Although it’s back now, some pages are missing images and some links are broken, all of which I will fix over the next few days.

The first I knew was I got an angry email from my ISP telling me that a DOS attack was coming from my connection, and that I should stop it immediately. I checked all my computers, and the web server seemed to be sluggish – the apache process was highly active and the gigabit network connection was completely maxed out! I disconnected it from the LAN and checked with my ISP that the attack had stopped, and they confirmed it had. So what the hell was it?

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This article goes through all the steps necessary to install the Nagios 3.0 monitoring solution on a PC, and then to get it monitoring multiple Windows servers. There seemed to be no place on the web which brought together the required steps: a simple install of Linux, installation of Nagios, and then configuration of Nagios to monitor multiple Windows Servers. This is now that place, and written from the point of view of someone who is much more comfortable in a Windows environment but with enough basic knowledge of Linux to get by.

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I recently installed the latest Ubuntu Linux on my laptop – Maverick Meerkat, aka version 10.10. Unfortunately there was a problem with one of the default software repositories, and here I document what I did to fix it. More »

I do not as a rule  buy things from PC World. What they have tends to be overpriced, their sales people are not as technologically aware as they make out, and they sell truly terrible PCs and laptops (amongst some OK ones). In addition, their website (http://www.pcworld.co.uk/) is a dead loss, a waste of time. It’s horrible to look at, it’s slow, and it’s really hard to find what you want.

However, it seems that if they have the exact piece of kit you want, they can be persuaded to part with them for much better prices than their shelf price tags suggest – using that same website. More »